THE LEAFLET
May 16 2024
good hands, three things you can do, in praise of awkwardness
ARE YOU IN GOOD HANDS?
I was talking with one of the badass-est leaders and org builders I know this week. We were trading stories about jobs that were exceptionally demanding but somehow never got us down. And then of jobs that were objectively easier than the ones in the first category, but somehow felt like the hardest things we’d ever done.
This gave rise to the “in good hands” theory. For both of us, when we felt like we were in good hands, when we knew a leader we trusted was somewhere out there backstopping us, we could demonstrate our greatest resilience. Teams, systems, agreements could collapse around us and we’d be ready for more. In fact, those serial collapses only made us stronger. We were anti-fragile, somehow.
By contrast, when we found ourselves in dubious hands, we became brittle. Little nicks bled and stung for a long time. Zest for the fight gave way to self-doubt and Sunday Scaries and much disreputable groaning. We didn’t show up as our best selves.
When I reflected on the times I thought I was in good hands, I realized I drew that sense from a very narrow set of facts:
The leader, even if a distant board member, would put success of the team or the effort ahead of her own success (perhaps even ahead of her own well-being, as ill-advised as that might be).
The leader had clear, high standards for excellence and didn’t give me a pass when I wasn’t measuring up.
-Eric
Read the rest here.
THE ONLY THREE THINGS YOU CAN DO
One of the most memorable lessons I’ve ever gotten from Ben came in a high school library almost 10 years ago. He was training a group of aspiring high school principals and extolling the virtues of Having Your Sh*t Together. (He had a nicer name for this but this is what he was talking about). Basically - being someone your team can count on, even for the pesky details. The kind of person who follows through every time and doesn’t use “vision” or “inspiration” as a crutch for bad execution.
The scales-from-my-eyes moment in this session was Ben’s simple assertion, adapted from David Allen: when it comes down to it, there are really only three next steps
Send an email
Book a meeting
Make a call
Every grand scheme you have for the bold future of your organization is probably going to start with one of those three things. That’s it! That’s the list. (I am assuming if you are reading this that you are doing knowledge economy-type stuff. It is striking that it was true for high schools principals, too - those noble souls literally shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of teenagers each day).
This shook me because I realized I had not been a serious person before this. I did not really Have My Sh*t Together. I erased the first step on the grand journey and that meant, so often, none of the other steps happened at all.
Send an email, book a meeting, make a call.
-Eric
Read the rest here.
LIGHTS, CAMERA, AWKWARD ROLE PLAY
A good faith, reasonable, modern thing you might do as a leader of people is avoid making those people feel awkward.
I call it good faith and modern and all because we’ve evolved away, healthily, from workplace cultures where a boss dominates and demeans their people and can just generally get away with being a bully. I do not recommend returning to that set of practices, even as a joke.
There are many cases, though, where awkwardness is a good sign. It’s the signature of the growth edge - the vaunted “zone of proximal development”. If you protect your people from all awkwardness, you cheat them of growth.
One way you can almost certainly make people feel awkward is to have them role play a conversation where they are using a skill you want them to be practicing even when you aren’t there watching. You can have them improvise parts of the conversation; you can script the whole thing. Either way, it will probably feel awkward for them as they play pretend.
That awkwardness can show you that yes, indeed, you’ve found something your people aren’t confident pros at, yet. That’s useful for you. The awkwardness can also velcro the conversation and the skill it’s designed to train into their memory. It gives something practical and technical an emotional salience it cannot have if they saw a diagram of it or read a blog post about it. They have lived the thing, even just for a minute, even in the fakest of fake circumstances.
That’s useful for them.
-Eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Author and airman Antoine de Saint-Exupery on love:
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
Culture critic Chuck Klosterman on art and love:
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
Writer James Baldwin with merciless empathy:
People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric